For any man the end of the world is first and foremost his own end

Balthasar’s Odyssey, published fittingly enough in the year 2000, is a novel by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. Maalouf, a former Prix Goncourt winner, writes in French rather than Arabic and in the 2003 Vintage translation I read is excellently translated by Barbara Bray.

This is the first Maalouf novel I’ve read, though I also have some of his non-fiction work on my shelf. I’ll be buying more. Balthasar’s Odyssey was warm, funny, intelligent, charming and at times extremely thought provoking. It’s also a tremendous blend of historical and literary fiction, enjoyable simply as a tale of a Levantine book merchant’s quest for a rare text across Seventeenth-century Europe or as a meditation on mortality, faith, tolerance, the importance of doubt and indeed on what it is to be a writer.

The novel opens in the year 1665. Balthasar Embriaco is a bookseller of Genoese family, but born and bred in Gibelet (also known as Byblos). He 40 years old, a plump widower kept company by his two nephews and his servant. A mild mannered and scholarly man, he is browbeaten by the more religiously observant of his nephews (Boumeh) into entering into a quest for a book titled The Hundredth Name. Boumeh believes (as do many others) that 1666 is the final year of the world, the apocalypse foretold in the bible and other holy texts, but the missing book is said to contain the famous hundredth name of god and knowledge of that name brings with it power that may help one survive the days to come.

Or may not, for Balthasar is something of a mild sceptic, worried that the apocalypse may be coming and that Boumeh may be correct, but suspicious too that Boumeh’s prophecies are too neat, his signs too convenient, that the world will continue as it always has:

I always think that if you look for signs you find them, and I write this down lest, in the maelstrom of madness that is seizing the world, I should one day forget it. Manifest signs, speaking signs, troubling signs – people always manage to “prove” what they want to believe; they’d be just as well off if they tried to prove the opposite.

Balthasar is a somewhat vain man, proud of his family’s long and once distinguished name, of his own business and reputation, of his intellect. To show belief in what he suspects to be mere superstition would be an embarrassment, a humiliation even, but what if he is wrong, what if the world really is about to end? Balthasar’s is is an equivocal soul, he is kind and generous but he is not the strongest willed of men.

Balthasar is also, critically, a writer – he keeps a journal of his travels and that journal forms the novel itself. The text is Balthasar’s journal, his thoughts, his observations, his private hopes, fears and shames. The consequence of that is that Balthasar’s Odyssey as a work is only enjoyable as long as Balthasar himself is enjoyable to spend time with, as long as he is interesting. It is fortunate then that he is one of the most likeable and most human characters I have encountered in fiction for quite some time.

As mentioned above, it’s quite possible to simply read Balthasar’s Odyssey as an often extremely funny account of a middle-aged and rather portly merchant’s misadventures across the Seventeenth-century world. He travels through Constantinople, where he encounters spectacular levels of corruption, to Chios where he encounters smugglers and yet more corruption, to Genoa, Amsterdam and to London itself. Along the way, he makes various friends, many of them themselves at least a touch eccentric, falls in love and engages in a touchingly written romance all the better for its at time faint absurdity (and which of us hasn’t been absurd when in love?). He runs into strange religious orders and dangerous criminals alike, all on a mission to obtain a book he isn’t persuaded actually has any real power at all.

There is then a great deal of gentle comedy in this work, but plenty of reminders too of quite how perilous the world back then was and quite how major an undertaking significant travel was too. Balthasar on his journeys has to contend with inclement weather, illness and plague, grasping and tricksy caravan masters, madmen and war. Death, on several occasions, is a real prospect. There are times he must hide from angry mobs, from possible execution, his journey is a terrifying one in many respects and he is not a courageous man by nature.

As a simple piece of historical fiction, Balthasar’s Odyssey is extremely successful. The characters are concerned with issues of their day, they persuade as men and women of their time and the places and incidents along the way are credible and well realised. If there were nothing else, I would have thoroughly enjoyed this novel.

Balthasar’s Odyssey though is not just a work of historical fiction. It is also a discussion of faith, doubt, fear and of what it is to be human. The concerns of the characters are concerns of their time, but concerns of ours too – intolerance, extremism, the dangers of people too convinced of their own rightness. Balthasar’s Odyssey is about the Seventeenth-century, yes, but humanity’s flaws then were the same as humanity’s flaws today.

Balthasar spends part of his journey with a Jewish friend he meets along the way, Maīmoun. Here Balthasar and Maīmoun are discussing the most beautiful sentence in any religion, Balthasar has proposed “Love they neighbour as thyself”, Maīmoun has reservations:

‘Wait. There’s something else, something more worrying, in my view. Some people are always sure to interpret this precept with more arrogance than magnanimity. They’ll read it as saying: What’s good for you is good for everyone else. If you know the truth, you ought to use every possible means to rescue lost sheep and set them on the right path again. Hence the forced baptisms imposed on my ancestors in Toledo in the past. And I myself have heard the injunction quoted more often by wolves than by lambs. So I’m sorry – I have doubts about it.”

…

“If you’re looking for the most beautiful saying to be found in any religion, the most beautiful that ever issued from the lips of man, that’s not it. The one I mean was spoken by Jesus too. He didn’t take it from Scripture though, he just listened to his own heart.”
What could it be? I waited. Maīmoun stopped his mount for a moment to underline the solemnity of his quotation.
“Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.”

Maīmoun too is a sceptic of the coming apocalypse, a more robust one than Balthasar who secretly doubts his own doubt. Maīmoun’s father, however, has no such doubts and fervently believes that the end days have come, indeed once equally fervently believed that they were due in 1648 and when the day of resurrection then failed to arrive on schedule merely adjusted his expected dates. Maīmoun lost his faith when his father’s apocalypse failed to arrive, his father merely assumed it had started but somewhere far away and so the evidence had yet to arrive. Maīmoun’s father, in other words, has faith. Maīmoun has none, all he has is tolerance, a belief in the importance of not judging others, and a hope that one day the whole world may be like Amsterdam where it is said Jew and Gentile are able to live in peace.

The issue of faith is one of many (too many for one blog entry) strands in this novel. Balthasar’s nephew, Boumeh, believes in numerology and that the secrets of the future are laid out in ways that can be divined through the manipulation of words and numbers. In one marvellous sequence, Boumeh rather patronisingly explains to Balthasar and Maīmoun how numerology proves that 1666 is the last year of the world:

“But why was an event announced in 1648 that’s supposed to take place in 1666? That’s a mystery I can’t understand!” I said.
“Nor can I,” agreed Maīmoun.
“I don’t see any mystery,” said Boumeh, with irritating calm.
Everyone waited with baited breath for him to go on. He took his time, then went on loftily:
“There are eighteen years between 1648 and 1666.”
He stopped.
“So?” asked Habib, through a mouthful of crystallised apricots.
“Don’t you see? Eighteen – six plus six plus six. The last three steps to the Apocalypse.”
There followed a most ominous silence. I suddenly felt that the pestilential vapour was approaching and closing in on us. Maīmoun was the most pensive of those present: it was as if Boumeh had just solved an old enigma for him. Hatem bustled around us, wondering what was the matter: he’d caught only scraps of our conversation.
It was I who broke the silence.
“Wait a moment, Boumeh!” I said. “That’s nonsense. I don’t have to tell you that in the days of Christ and the Evangelists people didn’t write six six six as you would today in Arabic: they wrote it in Roman figures. And your three sixes don’t make sense.”
“So can you tell me how they wrote 666 in the days of the Romans?”
“You know very well. Like this.”
I picked up a stick and wrote “DCLXVI” on the ground.
Maīmoun and Habib bent over and looked at what I’d written. Boumeh just stood where he was, not even glancing our way. He just asked me if I’d never noticed anything particular about the numbers I’d just traced. No, I hadn’t.
“Haven’t you noticed that all the Roman figures are there, in descending order of magnitude, and each occurs only once?”
“Not all of them,” I said quickly. “One’s missing…”
“Go on, go on – you’re getting there. There’s one missing at the beginning. The M – write it! Then we’ll have ‘MDCLXVI’. One thousand six hundred and sixty-six. Now the numbers are complete. And the years are complete. Nothing more will be added.”
Then he reached out and erased the figure completely, muttering some magic formula he’d learned.

A curse on numbers and on those who make use of them!

Balthasar is an intelligent man, but not a worldly one. He is often outwitted, and there are several occasions where he may have been outwitted, but cannot be sure and because he cannot we cannot. He is as reliable a narrator as he can be, but he is human and the limits of his perception become the limits of ours. As a reader, we too have to doubt, to operate in the absence of perfect knowledge, we have to accept that much as we may wish otherwise not all the answers may be forthcoming. There may be things we never know, however much we might wish to.

And that takes me onto another of the novel’s themes, what it means to be mortal, to know that everything we do may be lost on our death. Balthasar is a writer, he records all that he encounters and more importantly his secret thoughts and fears in his journals, but why? What’s the point of doing so? Indeed, what’s the point of doing anything?

Balthasar, and Balthasar’s Odyssey, has no answer to that. Balthasar after all is one of those in his world who do not have faith, and having no faith he has no solutions. Nonetheless, the nature of his quest – the possibility of apocalypse and of perhaps a magic name that will allow fate to be escaped – naturally turn his mind to these issues.

In the following passage, Balthasar is facing the loss of his journals, and asking himself why, if he cannot be sure his words will survive, he writes at all:

I know my words are bound to end up in oblivion. Our whole existence borders on oblivion. But we need at least a semblance, an illusion of permanence if we are to do anything at all. How can I fill these pages, how can I go on searching for the right words to describe events and emotions, if I can’t come back in ten or twenty years to revisit my past? And yet I still am writing, and shall go on doing so. Perhaps the honour of mortals resides in their inconsistencies.

Later, sitting in his room in a wooden building with the Great Fire of London approaching, Balthasar’s thoughts again turn to mortality:

The all-devouring fire draws closer and closer, and I sit here at this wooden table, in this wooden room, committing my last thoughts to a sheaf of pages that will ignite at the smallest spark! It’s madness, madness! But isn’t that just an image of my mortal condition? I dream of eternity when my grave is already dug, piously commending my soul to the One who’s about to snatch it away from me. When I was born I was a few years away from death. Now it may be no more than a few hours. But what’s a year anyway in comparison with eternity? What’s a day? An hour? A second? Such measures only have meaning for a heart that’s still beating.

Writing here becomes a metaphor for mortality, the act of writing, of recording something in the face of nothing, becomes both pointless and yet marvellous. An expression of hope in the absence of anything obvious to hope for. Balthasar is a frightened man, he does not want to die, he does not want his words to be lost, but he cannot help the risk of these things and so continues as if those risks did not exist. What else is there to do?

He writes for another reason too, one that perhaps holds true for any writer, he writes because it is his nature to do so. Because he cannot do otherwise.

What else can I do? My pen wields me as much as I wield it. I have to follow its path just as it follows mine.

All of that makes this sound a despairing novel, it really isn’t though. Balthasar is afraid of dying, but mostly his fears are more quotidian. There is a powerful sequence where the woman he has fallen in love with must go back for a while to her former lover, and his fears then at what may occur and whether she will return to him are in their way much worse than his fear of death or the end of the world (which really, as he reflects in the quote I used for my title, are the same thing). There is something profoundly human in this, he has his dark nights of the soul but he has too his mornings making love in a sunlit room, his meals with friends and late evening conversations, his anguish at the prospect of separation from friends and lovers, his guilt when he lets people down. The triumph of this novel is in the humanity of its protagonist, in his continuing to be human even though he suspects there is no purpose to it or to anything else. At the end, Balthasar’s Odyssey is a curiously hopeful novel – even though it holds out nothing particularly to hope for. We just hope anyway, we may as well.

Balthasar’s Odyssey

In this room the hours would accumulate like grains of sand until they buried him

And, indeed, they rather buried me.

The Glass Palace is Amitav Ghosh’s epic novel of love, family, sweeping history and the mutability of power. Published in 2000, it is 552 pages long, very much a widescreen novel (to use a phrase coined by John Self) and for me at least more melodrama than literary fiction.

It’s also, unfortunately, a book I didn’t find particularly successful. In fact, I got bored. Accordingly, for those looking for a more positive view on Ghosh (albeit a different novel), there’s an as ever excellent John Self review of Sea of Poppies here.

The Glass Palace is, in essence, Dickensian. It is immensely readable, the first couple of hundred pages absolutely zipped by and even after I’d lost interest it remained a very easy read. It is also a novel of real scope, ambitious in its way, and deeply concerned with social issues. It covers over a century of Burmese and Indian history, and in the course of that history addresses matters as diverse as the teak industry, the morality of imperialism, the long and short term effects of colonisation, and the realities of power and powerlessness.

It is also, however, Dickensian in its tendency to melodrama and to sentimentality, and is at times rather wearyingly obvious. The novel opens with a gruff yet kindly woman who takes in a quick witted orphan boy that I immediately guessed would have a great Copperfieldian destiny. I was right. Indeed, it was rare that I expected a particular outcome and was wrong. If I had been wrong a little more often, I would have liked the book more.

The central character is that orphan boy, an Indian named Rajkumar who is working at a food stall in Mandalay, just outside the walls of the Royal Palace. Within, the court await news of the outcome of recent conflicts with the British. They receive reports of glorious victories from their ministers, but hear the sounds of approaching cannon and soon see the arrival of dispassionate ranks of marching Indian soldiers. It is 1885, the year the British deposed the monarchy and absorbed Burma into their Empire, and in one of the finest passages of the book we see the sudden transition of authority from the court to the British. Everything polite, ordered, but the realities of power unmistakeable.

This is how power is eclipsed: In a moment of vivid realism, between the waning of one fantasy of governance and its replacement by the next; in an instant when the world springs free of its mooring of dreams and reveals itself to be girdled in the pathways of survival and self-preservation.

As the novel progresses, the story branches out. Rajkumar leaves Malaya to become a worker in the teak industry, leading to (genuinely fascinating) descriptions of the traditions and dangers of Nineteenth-century teak production. At the same time, we follow the court into exile to Ratnagiri, an isolated town in India where they have a fine view but little else. Rajkumar is a born entrepeneur, brilliant and driven. His sole tragedy, beside the death of his parents, is that as the royal family left their palace he fell in love at first sight with one of the queen’s handmaidens – Dolly, who is now living with the exiled monarchs in Ratnagiri. Dolly is spectacularly beautiful, patient and wise. Rajkumar does not know whether he will ever see Dolly again, though it comes as no surprise that of course he does.

Also in Ratnagiri is the Collector, a man of Indian extraction but who has won high position for a man of his ethnicity in the British run Indian Administrative Service. The Collector is Oxford educated, sees the British way as the civilised way and dreams of a European style marriage of equals with his unhappy wife Uma (who becomes fast friends with Dolly). The interaction of Dolly, Uma, the Collector and the royal family is in microcosm a study of the treatment by the coloniser of the colonised, the king’s attempts to live within the limits of his now foreshortened world often frustrated by a paternalist administration that wishes to protect him for his own good. Imperialism does not just occupy the lands of the conquered, it occupies their minds too.

Generally, the novel’s themes emerge naturally through the characters. Ghosh though is not always content with leaving points implicit, occasionally just directly telling the reader what to think. The following quote is an excerpt from a paragraph long authorial description of what may be read into the queen’s smile (a lot it seems), and for me is a modern voice directly commenting on the novel’s theme in rather a crude way:

A hundred years hence you will read the indictment of Europe’s greed in the difference between the kingdom of Siam and the state of our own enslaved realm.

The difficulty with this, beyond it coming dangerously close to being a lecture, is that by being so blunt it also becomes arguable. I’m no defender of colonialism, but I’m not sure the British can be wholly blamed for the present state of Burma. Singapore, Malaysia and India were conquered too after all, and are doing rather well these days. Ghosh is a good enough writer not to need this sort of blatant intervention, and could usefully trust his readers and his writing a little more, his points are already fairly hard to miss.

As the novel continues, the imperial theme continues to dominate. The demands of teak production (and, later, rubber production) wreak environmental havoc. Through Rajkumar and others (many approving or oblivious), we see the land exhausted for the benefit of its new masters. More subtly, each teak logging camp has its own British overseer – a young man who ensures the native workers carry out their tasks – and so is its own colonial state. This was probably my favourite part of the book, the descriptions are rich, the sense of the camps – temporary villages which like the trees themselves are each the same yet each fractionally different – vivid. There are some off notes, a campfire ghost story which I thought added nothing save colour for its own sake, but in the main I’d happily have read a whole novel set just in these settlements, among the near indentured workers, their elephants and their overseers.

Rajkumar grows rich, chiefly by becoming a small imperialist himself, going to India and coming back with poor villagers misled into working in dangerous conditions in Burma. Rajkumar, like the British, has little sympathy for those he exploits. He is a man driven by the need for success, like the Collector he adopts the values of the British, though here their avarice rather than their culture. Dolly and Uma continue their more domestic dramas, with Dolly’s quiet wisdom enabling Uma to grow and become more independent. Uma’s has one of the novel’s better character arcs, her growth over the book organic and one of its few unexpected elements. Her argument with Rajkumar, in which they attack each other’s philosophies, constitutes one of the novel’s best passages (which sadly I can’t quote for fear of spoilers).

There’s a lot of plot in this book, of which I’ve summarised only a fraction. As the novel continues, it follows the characters’ lives and those of their friends, their children and their friends’ children. Decades pass as the characters argue, trade, love, marry. Colonialism recurs in the form of the Japanese occupation, the British defeated just as they defeated the Burmese, maintaining their colonial distinctions to the end with evacuation trains marked for Whites only.

From the war we go to Indian independence, post-independence politics and even the Burmese democracy movement. Everywhere, there is scope, the sweep of history, great events and in the midst of it all the characters who are each beautiful, passionate, brilliant people. I longed for one of them to want to open a bakery or to become an accountant, sadly not, there is no room here for small people.

And that takes me to one of The Glass Palace’s key flaws, there really aren’t many decent characters. Rajkumar, Uma and a young Indian army officer in the twentieth-century by the name of Arjun (who is faced with agonising issues of loyalty, as the Japanese advance and he has to face questions as to what and who he is fighting for) are the only interesting ones in the lot. Dolly is beautiful and wise, but not convincingly human, the Collector is credible but hardly deep, others are similarly unsatisfying. As in much science fiction, the characters are there primarily to allow the story to progress. They are a vehicle, not a destination.

As I noted above, in the main the story and themes are expressed through the characters, but the price paid is that each of them has only room for a handful of traits (shy, brilliant photographer say, or free spirited and beautiful, to take two examples). The result is that many of them just aren’t that convincing. Worse yet is the tendency to cliché, all the men are brilliant, all the women beautiful (save Uma, who is brilliant), everyone is exceptional and special.

As the novel continues, the problem with characterisation gets worse. Even Aung San Suu Kyi when she appears is described as “beautiful almost beyond belief”. Really? Is it not enough that she is a fighter for democracy in a corrupt regime who has spent years of her life for her cause, must we also suddenly make her breathtakingly beautiful too? Would her work not otherwise count? There is a triteness to this, a simplicity of thought which is fair enough in an airport thriller but less appealing in a Booker nominated novelist, a problem made worse by the predictability of most of the character’s fates which by and large reflect their thinly sketched traits all too neatly.

There are other misjudged notes, such as when Dolly has a psychic experience. Given the novel has an omniscient authorial voice this is presented as simple fact and for me it was a bizarrely jarring episode. An event which fits well enough I suppose into a middlebrow family saga, but which I struggled with in what was ostensibly a serious novel.

All that said, The Glass Palace is by no means all bad. Ghosh has a definite talent for description and metaphor – the title of this blog entry for example is a line regarding the king’s room in Ratnagiri, where he will live out his exile. Equally, in the following passage the evocation of grief and its savage bleakness is for me very effective:

The station at Sungei Pattani was as pretty as a toy: there was a single platform shaded by a low red-tiled awning. Dion spotted Alison as the train was drawing in: she was standing in the shade of the tin awning, wearing sunglasses and a long black dress. She looked thin, limp, wilted – a candlewick on whom grief grief burnt like a flame.
…
‘You want the pain to be simple, straightforward – you don’t want it to ambush you in these roundabout ways, each morning, when you’re getting up to do something else – brush your teeth or eat your breakfast…’

Equally, Ghosh sometimes does use the space he gives himself to good effect. Indian troops serving British masters are introduced as a minor element, hundreds of pages and decades later we see them again but from their own perspective. Ghosh trusts the reader to note how much they’ve changed. Here, a character in the 1880s speaks of the Indian troops that serve the British:

‘For a few coins they would allow their masters to use them as they wished, to destroy every trace of resistance to the power of the English … How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger, but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?’

Sixty years or so later, an Indian officer still under ultimate British command speaks to one of his men, another Indian, of those earlier troops:

‘But your father and grandfather were here,’ Arjun said to Hardy. ‘It was they who helped in the colonisation of these places. They must have seen some of the things that we’ve seen. Did they never speak of all this?’
‘They were illiterate yaar. You have to remember that we’re the first generation of Indian soldiers.’
‘But still, they had eyes, they had ears, they must occasionally have talked to local people?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘The truth is yaar, they weren’t interested; they didn’t care; the only place that was real to them was their village.”

But by about page 500 the pacing of the novel falls apart, picking up a little after a detour to 1990s Myanmar but generally feeling like a tidying up of threads and putting away of deckchairs. There are some rather dull soliloquies on the Burmese democracy movement, a little sermonising, and a remarkably irritating final couple of pages.

The Glass Palace is a broad novel, but not a deep one. It has many good elements, anyone looking for a sweeping Gone with the Wind style historical epic should find much to enjoy and it is genuinely intelligent on the lasting psychological impact of colonialism. It suffers though from a crudity of characterisation, from at times being simply too obvious, and in all honesty from just being longer than it needs to be.

In parting, it is perhaps worth mentioning that Tan Twan Eng’s novel The Gift of Rain has some degree of thematic overlap with The Glass Palace. Both speak, among other things, to issues of loyalty, patriotism, the legacy of colonialism and the nature of power. The difference, for me, is that The Gift of Rain addresses those topics while retaining depth of character. The Glass Palace by contrast is well researched, clearly something of a labour of love for Ghosh, but the history leaves too little room for the humanity.

The Glass Palace

The East! The East!

Mark Mazower’s The Balkans, subtitled “From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day”, is a 176 page (including detailed guide to further reading and index) overview of the history of the Balkans over the past 550 years or so. It is a masterpiece of concision that sheds light on a complex and fractured history, while at the same time passionately arguing for a view of the Balkans rooted in European reality rather than easy mythology. To Mazower’s credit, heavy reference is made to primary sources, resulting in a book usefully illustrated with quotes from travellers to the Balkans and the people themselves.

Mazower examines, in surprising detail given the limited space he allows himself, the conditions of the Balkans under Ottoman rule, the perceptions in the West of the Christian subjects of the Sublime Porte and the implications our concepts of Orientalism had on our understanding of Balkan territory. He also addresses how, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, old divisions based on religion came to be replaced with imported concepts of nationalism – with ultimately horrifying results (though, as he is at pains to point out, results echoed in many other parts of Europe).

Mazower investigates too the root causes of the relative lack of development in the Balkans, focusing (among other factors) on the lack of major navigable rivers and the presence of geographic barriers to the development of rail networks, which coupled with membership of a declining and backward-gazing empire during the key years of the nineteenth century led to the region missing out on much of the development experienced further West.

Coupled with late industrialisation were slow patterns of urbanisation, with a relatively late continuation of the peasantry as dominant social group. That, in turn, led to generations of Western travellers romanticising a peasant population onto which they projected their own ideologies.

In other words, the emergence in the Balkans of urban populations at a level close to the European norm, with its characteristic pattern of small families, high consumption, industry and services, is entirely a product of the last five or six generations. Until well into this century, the peasant predominated, for few people lived in the towns, and few of those who did lacked close ties to the land.

Looking at the peasants dressed in their picturesque costumes, foreign visitors were struck by the persistance of what they regarded as an antiquated life form. ‘In most ways the native seems to have changed little since Biblical days,’ wrote two British students of Macedonia in 1921, ’so that it may almost be said that in observing the modern Macedonia one is studying the type amongst whom St. Paul preached and travelled.’ Their view that ‘the primitiveness of the native peasantry is their most marked feature’, was one shared implicitly both by travel writers and by postwar modernisation theorists and social anthropologists. Ethnographers, enthralled by the nineteenth-century romantic view of peasants as the respository of national tradition, charted what they took to be the pagan origins of their beliefs, ornaments and customs; American classicists heard in the oral epic poetry of Serbican guslar players the direct descendants of Homer.

On that last note, Ismail Kadare’s novel The File on H uses the 1930s efforts of American academics to study then contemporary epic poetry to explore issues of censorship and surveillance in Hoxha’s Albania as well as to discuss the nature of oral traditions. Ismail Kadare is a superb writer, and I recommend The File on H (and equally Broken April, which deals in blood feuds, the Albanian code known as the Kadun and more broadly on how to live with knowledge of mortality) unreservedly.

Returning to The Balkans, Mazower is also excellent on the role of Orthodox Christianity in the region, how it was preserved in part by the fact of Ottoman conquest from the threat of the Catholic powers. Under the Ottomans, there was a spread (despite growing and eventually endemic corruption) of an Orthodox world within the Ottoman world – “a world of Balkan orthodoxy whose horizons stretched from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Northern Italy to Russia.”

Key here is how under the Ottomans communities were generally governed by members of their own faith. The Orthodox were ruled by in the main the Orthodox, though close contact and intermingling with Moslems and Jews often led to a pragmatic blurring of faiths…

We read, for example, of a sixteenth-century Istanbul man who vowed in the midst of a dangerous fever that if he recovered he would give up his taste in young boys. Cured, he thought better of it, but hesitated to break his vow. Having been advised by the ulema of Istanbul that he could not wriggle out of an oath once made, he sought the advice of the rabbis of Salonika to see if they could find a loop-hole. (They suggested he try women).

This promiscuity of faiths matters because for Mazower it puts the lie to Samuel Huntington’s famous concept of the ‘clash of civilisations’, which “situated the Balkans on one of the global fault-lines of this clash.” Mazower is clear that whatever the future may hold, Huntington’s thesis is in no way true of the past, that there was a cross-traffic of conversions, practices, beliefs and traditions – and a degree of cohabitation – that have no reflection in a Huntingtonian world.

Continuing the remarkable combination of brevity and precision that characterises this book, Mazower lucidly explains the background to and causes of World War I in around six pages, a tremendous feat in my view. Naturally there is a loss of detail, but in a title coming in at just 176 pages any topic is necessarily just an introduction. That he sheds light on the conflict at all, I consider no small achievement.

In dealing with the twentieth century, Mazower deals also of course with more recent history, and with the bloody internal conflicts and ethnic cleansing that have characterised it. For Mazower, the concept of there being a “peculiar propensity to violence among the people of the region” is a myth, he is at pains to place Balkan conflicts in the context of wider European conflicts and to show a pattern of massacres over our joint history.

Writing off Balkan violence as primeval and unmodern has become one way for the West to keep the desired distance from it. Yet, in fact, ethnic cleansing is not a specifically Balkan phenomenon. It took place through much of central and eastern Europe during and immediately after Hitler’s war: more than fifty forced population movements took place in the 1940s, involving the death and transplantation of millions of Germans, Poles, Ukranians and many others. The roots of its ferocity lie not in Balkan mentalities but in the nature of a civil war waged with the technological resources of the modern era. Unlike national wars, civil wars do not unify society – in the way, for instance, the Second World War helped unify British society. On th econtrary, they exacerbate latent tensions and differences, and are fought out amid a total breakdown of social and governmental institutions.

Mazower reminds the reader more than once that ethnic cleansing is not unique to the Balkans, quoting also in this light Hitler’s comment ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’. This refers of course to the 1915-1916 massacres of hundreds of thousands (perhaps more) Armenians by the Ottomans – still controversial today.

For Mazower, the difficulty with understanding the Balkans lies not in its history being unusually complex or fractious, but rather in the perceptions we have built up of it as somewhere Easternised, alien. Its long existence under Ottoman rule and the widespread nineteenth (and indeed more recent) view that Europe is synonymous with Christendom have resulted in its being seen as outside our culture and history, apart from us. But of course, as with Turkey itself, any attempt to separate the Balkans from the rest of Europe is based on fantasy, there is no clear line to be found.

The disconcerting inter-penetration of Europe and Asia, West and East, finds its way into most descriptions of the Balkans in modern times. Europe is seen as a civilising force, a missle embedding itself in the passive matter of the Orient. Travellers routinely comment on signs of ‘European’ life such as houses with glass windows, cabarets, or hotels with billiard rooms. Balkan cities are usually described as having a European facade behind which hides an oriental – meaning picturesque but dirty, smelly, wooden and unplanned – reality. Railways are European, cart tracks are not; technology is definitely European, but not religious observance. The social fabric is almost always divided into a modernising surface and a traditional substance. Oriental realities – the power of religion, the prevalence of agrarian poverty – are assumed to be phenomena which have not changed for centuries. By the end of the nineteenth century, as numerous accounts testify, it was virtually impossible for Western travellers – esposed to the heady delights and sensual Orientalism of writers such as Pierre Lodi – not to see the Balkans in this way.

Mazower’s book is excellent, a fascinating introduction to the region and its history and one that shed for me considerable light on both. I learnt much that I did not previously know, and was inspired to read further (I have a copy of Misha Glenny’s much longer book of the same name and of Mazower’s history of Salonika, now known as Thessaloniki). This is a tremendous work of popular history which carries the depth of its understanding on light and easily read prose.

Spectacular.

The Balkans. My copy had a better cover than that, showing a bomb-thrower being taken into custody in Sarajevo in 1914. The cover linked to for me is redolent of the Orientalism Mazower is so keen to dispel, which is a bit of a shame in some respects.

Broken Angels

Broken Angels is Richard Morgan’s second novel, published in 2003 and the sequel to his first novel Altered Carbon which I discuss here.

Like Altered Carbon, it features his protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, here working as a mercenary in a bitterly fought war taking place on a planet with valuable alien artefacts, remnants of a race humans refer to as Martians – as that was where we found the first trace of their relics.

Altered Carbon was a work of updated cyberpunk fiction, but a work that went back to the genre’s roots and which was infused with a distinct noir sensibility. Here Morgan is writing something closer to military SF (a sub-genre I have little personal familiarity with) and the tone is therefore quite different. Morgan expands his setting, filling in details such as how humanity came to colonise the worlds it has (following Martian maps, in short) and how wars are fought and fortunes made over the artefacts this seemingly long dead race left behind them (though whether they really are dead, or simply no longer in this part of space, is not known). As Kovacs reflects:

In the end, we’re not much more than a pack of jackals, nosing through the broken bodies and wreckage of a plane crash.

It’s not giving too much away then to say that before too long, Kovacs is involved in a scheme to lay claim to what may be the greatest find in xenoarchaeology ever made, a scheme that could make his fortune and the fortune of all involved. Naturally, with a prize so valuable, other interests are involved and the result is a fast moving and exciting novel but a novel which is plot rather than character driven.

As a rule, I don’t discuss plot details on my blog, to do so can after all damage a book for a future reader quite badly. Happily, plot isn’t that important to most novels I read, so that generally leaves me quite a lot to say still. Here, the plot is so central that in avoiding spoilers I’m left unable to discuss a lot of what makes this worth reading, that said Morgan is an interesting and intelligent writer and there are some themes in this work that are I think worth bringing out.

Morgan continues to explore the mind/body problems created by his fictional future, in which human minds can be digitally stored and transferred body to body. Bodies are referred to as sleeves, and the wealthy or the useful can be resleeved on death, placed in a new body. At the novel’s start, Kovacs and the mercenary company he is attached to are sleeved in bodies genetically tweaked for combat and with elements of wolf dna included in their makeup, to encourage aggression but more importantly team bonding (pack behaviour). In the first novel, Kovacs’ sleeve causes him to be attracted to an ex-lover of that sleeve’s original inhabitant, the chemistry between them being a matter of biology rather than mind. Here, Kovacs is fiercely loyal to those he works with, a loyalty born again of his body rather than his mind. Later in the novel, at the archaeological site, Kovacs is suffering from severe radiation poisoning and the implications of being in a dying body but with a mind which can escape it are explored to good effect – the tensions between the signals the body is sending and the intellectual (but not visceral) knowledge that the poisoning is a problem of logistics, rather than mortality.

Morgan also expands his setting, perhaps less successfully. His future is one that, to anyone who has read a decent amount of SF, will seem very familiar. Machiavellan corporations use covert ops against each other while within them executives compete through dirty tricks (including assassination) as much as by more normal business techniques. A long vanished and little understood civilisation grants humanity access to advanced technology it doesn’t understand, faster than light travel is employed though without raising issues of causality. All these (particularly the precursor aliens’ concept) are SF staples, the corporations a cliche of cyberpunk fiction.

More curiously, Morgan also introduces in this novel references to Voodoo, it transpiring that some colonies practice this faith and one central character being a Houngan on the side. Although this is clearly a reference to William Gibson’s Count Zero which features Voodoo and seeming-Loa as a major element, it feels bolted on here and the occasional implications that it may have some underyling validity sit oddly in what is otherwise a broadly hard SF novel.

It is apparent from Altered Carbon how much of a debt Morgan owes to William Gibson, the two novels after all have fairly similar core stories (not that I thought to mention it in my previous writeup). The Voodoo element in Broken Angels is a continuation of that debt, and it’s not of course unusual for new authors (as Morgan still was at this point) to wear their influences a little obviously, but in Altered Carbon that influence worked to strengthen the novel where here it feels more of an intrusion.

Much more successful are Morgan’s dead aliens, the Martians (not that there’s any evidence, thankfully, that they come from Mars). Little is known of them, but what is is subtly alien, their psychology unlike ours in ways I found convincing and interesting. Each of their maps places has its place of discovery at the centre, each Martian colony considering itself the most important site of their civilisation. There is little evidence of cities, as a winged predator species the Martians seemed not to possess the herd instincts of humanity, spreading out and following settlement patterns very different to our own.

More interesting yet, is how Morgan shows that the beliefs about the Martians say far more about those holding those beliefs than they do about the Martians themselves. So little is known of the Martians, and so much of what is known ambiguous, that they become a canvas on which are painted the desires of all who consider them.

In real life, there is a fascinating direct parallel for this. Theories of the psychology and behaviour of Neanderthal man have varied dramatically through history, even now some hold views on them that bear little resemblance to what little we can deduce from their remains. Just as the Victorians considered them ape-men, and some modern day utopians herald them as beings who lived peacefully in harmony with nature, our lack of knowledge of them allows them to become what we need them to be.

In Morgan’s future, the nature of the Martians is politicised, espousing the wrong theory of their character can lead to imprisonment or worse. While academics argue (surreptitiously) over the facts, others hail them as spiritual beings since passed beyond but who could – were they still here – teach us much. Again, the lack of real evidence makes them both politically and theologically convenient, a secular receptacle for our myths.

As the novel progresses, as the artefact at the core of the plot is explored, more is learnt of their natures and the meaning of the title becomes clearer. The Martians are the broken angels, advanced beyond us to an unimaginable extent, but still for all that flawed and mortal creatures, perhaps not up to bearing the weight of belief now invested in them.

Like its predecessor, Broken Angels is in places an extremely violent novel. It also contains some explicit sex scenes, the language of which is scarcely less aggressive than the battles. The novel is written in Kovacs’ voice, and Kovacs has no metaphors to hand which are not violent ones. He thinks in terms of killing, destroying, even when engaged in sex with someone he cares for:

…she fed me into herself with the confidence of someone chambering a round.

or when asked to contemplate what it would mean to have faith:

‘You’re wrong, Hand,’ I said quietly. ‘I’d love to have access to all this shit you believe. I’d love to be able to summon someone who’s responsible for this fuck-up of a creation. Because then I’d be able to kill them, slowly.’

That violence of language makes this still a surprisingly bleak novel, characters die (some permanently) with shocking suddenness, interludes of peace are interrupted by passages of horrific brutality, Kovacs is an engine of destruction when called on to act and his opponents are no less savage. This is a novel in which largely amoral people act from greed and have no compunction about killing those who get in their way, it’s not a noir work but a noir influence does remain, including sometimes in reminders of the cost that violence carries for those not at all responsible for it:

Clotted white.
For fragments of a second, standing in the hatch of the Nagini and staring across the expanse of sand, I thought it had been snowing.
‘Gulls,’ Hand said knowledgeably, jumping down and kicking at one of the clumps of feathers underfoot. ‘Radiation from the blast must have got them.’
Out on the tranquil swells, the sea was strewn with mottled white flotsam.

Ultimately, this is for me a less successful work than Altered Carbon. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, I thought this in fact an extremely good science fiction novel, but Altered Carbon I thought reinvigorated and pushed forward the cyberpunk genre while this is happy to be an excellent example of its genre. That said, Count Zero isn’t as good as Neuromancer, so perhaps here too the Gibsonian influence is showing…

Morgan later wrote a third (and apparently final) Takeshi Kovacs novel, before that however he wrote a novel called Market Forces which is the next of his I shall read. Of Morgan’s entire output, Market Forces tempts me least being an apparently rather heavy handed satire of capitalism and featuring more of his trademark violence but without the Kovacs’ voice to account for it. After that (and Market Forces isn’t that high on my current tbr pile), it’ll be back to Kovacs for Broken Furies and then on to Morgan’s more recent works which look very interesting indeed.

Broken Angels

The social relations of production

Three to Kill is a 1976 slice of extraordinarily black French noir fiction, written by Jean-Patrick Manchette and translated in the Serpent’s Tail edition by Donald Nicholson-Smith. It was brought to my attention by Guy Savage over at the His Futile Occupations blog, here. There’s good detail there on the place of Manchette within French literary traditions, which I don’t plan to repeat here but do recommend.

The essence of noir is the examination of the role of the individual within society, a moral examination. In Three to Kill, that examination takes the form of an inquiry into the way in which individuals are shaped by the social and economic forces surrounding them, the way in which ultimately individuals are a product of those forces (the novel’s philosophy is distinctly Marxist).

Plotwise, the novel is simple. Georges Gerfaut is a mid-level manager who is driving home one evening when he sees what appears to be an accident. Fearful that he will be reported if he drives by without helping, he stops, and takes an injured man to hospital (though begrudgingly so, due to the risk of blood getting on his car seats). Georges does not stay to give his details at the hospital, leaving before they can be obtained, and soon after goes to holiday at the seaside with his wife and daughters. There, two hit men try to murder him, and Georges ends up on the run, alienated from his previously comfortable life and determined at all costs to remain alive.

The above synopsis makes this sound like a suspense novel. However, the novel opens after these events (then jumps back to just before they started), and explains within the first two pages that Georges has killed at least two men. As Georges is alive to open the novel and there were two hit men men pursuing him we have a good idea what must happen. The point then is not whether Georges survives, whether the hit men succeed. The point is what Georges is and what makes him what he is.

I’ll return to that in a moment, first though I’d like to quote the opening chapter of the novel, a brief passage that immediately set a profoundly unsettling tone:

And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now: Georges Gerfaut is driving on Paris’s outer ring road. He has entered at the Porte d’Ivry. It is two-thirty or maybe three-fifteen in the morning. A section of the inner ring road is closed for cleaning, and on the rest of the inner ring road traffic is almost nonexistent. On the outer ring road there are perhaps two or three or at the most four vehicles per kilometer. Some are trucks, many of them very slow moving. The other vehciles are private cars, all travelling at high speed, well above the speed limit. This is also true of Georges Gerfault. He has had five glasses of Four Roses bourbon. And about three hours ago he took two capsules of a powerful barbiturate. The combined effect on him has not been drowsiness, but a tense euphoria that threatents at any moment
to change into anger or else into a kind of vaguely Chekhovian and essentially bitter melancholy, not a very valiant or interesting feeling. Georges Gerfault is doing 145 kilometers per hour.

Georges Gerfaut is a man under forty. His car is a steel-gray Mercedes. The leather upholstery is mahogany brown, matching all the fittings of the vehicle’s interior. As for Georges Gerfaut’s interior, it is somber and confused; a clutch of left-wing ideas may just be discerned. On the car’s dashboard, below the instrument panel, is a mat metal plate with Georges’s name, address and blood group engraved upon it, along with a piss-poor depiction of Saint Christopher. Via two speakers, one beneath the dashboard, the other on the back-window deck, a tape player is quietly diffusing West Coast style jazz: Gerry Mulligan, Jimmy Giuffre, Chico Hamilton. I know, for instance, that at one point it is Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler’s “Truckin’” that is playing, as recorded by the Bob Brookmeyer Quintet.

The reason why Georges is barrelling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

Note the uncertainty in that description. What time is it? How many vehicles are there? How many men, exactly, did Georges kill? There is no narrator, the voice we hear is the author’s, the novel is obviously his own creation so clearly the uncertainties in this section are deliberate. I found this a disquieting opening, a note of ambiguity already present, although too it is undeniably cinematic, easy to visualise.

Marchant employs a curiously dispassionate prose style, he writes without affect, lavishing as much care on the description of everyday objects as he does people’s bodies or the people themselves. There is a coldness to the descriptions, individuals, like things, are objects which have a nature and a role. Brand names are always cited, the label given a thing is as important as the thing itself. It is reminiscent in this of the much later US novel American Psycho, though Three to Kill is better written and without the sadism of Ellis’ novel which can make it ultimately an unpleasant read (American Psycho for me in any event becomes fatally flawed when it is made explicit, rather than ambiguous, that Bateman is in fact a killer and not merely a fantasist).

Recrossing the room, he crushed his cigarette out in an alabaster ashtray, which he took back with him to the sofa, then he sat down again and lit another Gitane filter with his Criquet lighter. The quadrophonic speakers softly dispensed soft music. Gerfaut smoked and contemplated the living room, only a portion of whose lighting, the dimmest, was on at present. An elegant penumbra consequently enveloped the armchairs and matching sofa; the coffee table,; the off-white plastic cubes bearing a cigarette box, a scarlet plastic lamp in the form of a mushroom, and recent issues of L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Playboy (American edition), L’Écho des Savane, and other periodicals; the record cabinets containing four or five thousand francs’ worth of classical, opera and West Coast jazz LPs; and the built-in teak bookshelves with several hundred volumes representing the finest writing ever produced by humanity and a fair amount of junk.

That last phrase by the way, “the finest writing ever produced by humanity and a fair amount of junk”, I suspect I’m far from alone in recognising my own shelves in that. That aside, however, what we have here are the trappings of a bourgeois lifestyle – a comfort taken in the material, in its quality, it’s evidence of good taste and in the expense and therefore success it represents. By contrast, the hit men who pursue him live out of hotel rooms, their possessions kept in bags in the rear of their car. Georges is defined by his things, as perhaps are they too, for Manchette describes in equal detail the tools of their particular trade.

Manchette’s emotionless, flatly descriptive, style extends to the novel’s action sequences too. This is a novel which contains scenes of shocking violence, described in the same tone as Manchette describes a stereo system or a domestic argument.

The Lancia turned on a dime and drove into the gas station via the exit. The car sprang towards Gerfaut, who pulled the trigger of the automatic. The Lancia’s windshield exploded. At the same time, Gerfaut jumped back, stumbled, and fell hard against a coffee machine, bruising his back agonizingly. The bright red car bore down on him, rocking and pitching. Gerfaut fled for his life, but the Lancia swerved and accelerated, threatening to smash Gerfaut into the office window. Gerfaut pirouetted away, but the car’s left headlight struck him glancingly on the buttock and catapulted him across the cement on his belly. The Lancia utterly demolished the office window. With a thunderous roar, huge pieces of broken plate glass, road maps, toolboxes, cans of oil, lightbulbs, and cartoony promotional figures made of wire and latex were hurled in every direction.

Even amidst the chaos and danger of this scene, Marchant takes the time to itemise the objects at hand, to list them one by one – his eye as a novelist like the eye of a camera – recording what is present without judgement of importance.

As the novel progresses it becomes clear Gerfaut was not always a bourgeois, that he is in fact a ‘68er (and who in France wasn’t? I sometimes suspect there are people born in the ’70s who claim to have been on the Paris barricades in ‘68). He has friends who were involved in struggles against the police in which hundreds of Algerians were killed. Few of them are now political, but only Georges has completely adopted the lifestyle he once presumably detested. Soon after the opening, an old comrade now a trade union organiser genially refers to Georges as a sell-out, as the two of them share a whisky. Indeed, it is worth noting that the whole backdrop of the novel is one of industrial unrest, strikes, labour activism, a whole strata of society keen to destroy capitalism and bring down men like Georges and all he stands for. Georges was once one of them, but his situation changed and with it his outlook.

Which takes me to another key theme, Georges’ plasticity as an individual. When Georges’ situation changes, so does he. When he is a comfortable manager, he lives as such and thinks as such, vaguely unhappy but making no move to change his situation. When he is forced to go onto the run, he adapts swiftly, adopting the lifestyle of a fugitive with ease and leaving behind his wife and two daughters with barely a second thought, changing his life as easily as he discards a pair of broken shoes. When Georges is forced to kill, he becomes a killer just as readily, and just as much without thought. He is a product of his circumstance, an expression of the social means of relation.

Georges’ is not a naturalistic portrait, rather it is a Marxist analysis of the individual as an economic and social unit. Georges sees himself through the prism of received experience, understanding his own adventures at first as if he were himself a character in a novel or film, it is only as hunger and exposure begin to threaten his survival he starts to understand the difference between his narrative of his flight and the grim reality. As he does so, he becomes less reflective, more a man of action and necessity, no longer a product of the class that bore him. Gerfaut becomes a woodsman and hunter, acclimatises himself without difficulty to life in a small mountain cottage with an old man for company. Reduced to simple circumstances, he becomes a simple man.

Gerfaut made himself useful by running little errands in the village; he would pick up tobacco for instance, or Riz la Croix cigarette papers, or lighter fluid when the need arose. Occasionally, at the café-tabac, he would glance through the regional paper, Le Dauhpiné Libéré, to see what was happening in the world. Sporting events took up as much space as ever, Third World riots, famines, floods, epidemics, assassinations, palace revolutions, and local wars still followed one another in quick succession. In the West the economy was not working well, mental illness was rife, and social classes were still locked in struggle. The Pope deplored the unrestrained hedonism of the age.

Georges is firmly portrayed as an example of his class and situation, his enemies are less clear cut, but are perhaps themselves examples of another form of enemy of the working class. One is a retired Dominican officer in hiding whom somehow Georges has crossed, the others are two hit men sent after Georges. We see the soldier’s solitary domestic routine, the hitmen’s friendship and casual brutality, they are monsters, but like Georges they are simply presented as they are, without further comment. The Dominican helped crack down on suspected Leftists in his homeland, “persons suspected of collusion with the class enemy”, the hit men now serve to carry out his wishes in the US (perhaps themselves an example of false class consciousness, but I go there beyond my knowledge of Marxist theory).

Whatever the characters’ individual traits, their collision here is a class collision. It is a situation where a man is taken from his bourgois comfort and exposed to the brutal realities of class struggle, and who when so taken ceases almost immediately to be an intellectual and a productive member of ordinary society and instead becomes as ruthless as those who hunt him.

This is a well and leanly written novel, quintessential noir in its critique of a society and a way of life. It is disquieting in its giving the same priority to the description of a woman’s stomach as it does to a glass of whisky or a bullet tearing through a person’s side, all of them illustrated with the same precision and lack of compassion. It is alien too in its explicitly Marxist stance, with vast dispassionate economic forces shaping human lives as effortlessly as a car factory shapes the products it spits forth. Sadly, it is one of only two by Marchant that have been translated into (American, if it matters) English. I intend to pick up the other without delay.

Three to Kill

You would not enjoy Nietzche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

P.G. Wodehouse is one of the best comic writers in print, a master of the comic phrase, with a style of writing which I believe requires far more skill than is immediately apparent (much like Runyon in that, though the styles are very different in some respects). He is an incredibly funny writer, endlessly quotable, fully deserving of his fame.

Wodehouse’s most famous creations are of course Bertie Wooster and his Gentleman’s Gentleman, Jeeves. It’s unlikely anyone reading this doesn’t know who they are, but on the off chance Bertram Wooster is a wealthy young man of good family but, like Winnie the Pooh, of very little brain. Still, he’s a generous young man, innocent of harm and generally a pretty nice chap. Jeeves is his valet, a man of unusual intelligence and resource, a perfect servant and one on whom Bertie relies to get him and his friends out of their endless scrapes involving fearsome aunts, unsuitable chorus girls and other unlikely adventures.

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch him like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He’s like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.

Probably the best place to start with Jeeves and Wooster is the 1923 collection The Inimitable Jeeves, eleven connected short stories which as well as being among the first are among the best Wodehouse ever wrote. After that, comes Carry on, Jeeves – the collection I’m writing about today. Written in 1925, this contains ten stories, many of them set during Bertie’s sojourn in New York in hiding from his Aunt Agatha, and which are in the main brilliant.

Like the TV series House (for the first three seasons anyway) or the boxing stories of Robert E. Howard, almost every Jeeves and Wooster story follows much the same template. That doesn’t matter, one doesn’t read Wodehouse for the plot, one reads for the sheer brilliance of the prose, but it can mean that a collection can be more enjoyable if spaced out a story or two at a time between other reads. That said, I gulped this collection down in two days, and enjoyed it thoroughly, good enough writing after all forgives any fault.

So, what is this template? Well, it doesn’t hold for every story, but it does for most. Here goes:

1. We normally open to learn that Bertie and Jeeves have to a degree fallen out, normally over some sartorial experiment upon which Bertie is engaged and of which Jeeves does not approve.

… Soft silk shirts with evening costume are not worn, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I said, looking the blighter diametrically in the centre of the eyeball, ‘they’re dashed well going to be. I may as well tell you now that I have ordered a dozen of those shirtings from Peabody and Simms, and it’s no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant.’
‘If I might-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said, raising my hand, ‘argument is useless. Nobody has a greater respect than I have for your judgement in socks, in ties, and – I will go farther – in spats; but when it comes to evening shirts your nerve seems to fail you. You have no vision. You are prejudiced and reactionary. Hidebound is the word that suggests itself. It may interest you to learn that when I was at Le Touquet the Prince of Wales buzzed into the Casino one night with soft silk shirt complete.’
‘His Royal Highness, sir, may permit himself a certain licence which in your own case-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s no use. When we Woosters are adamant, we are – well, adamant, if you know what I mean.’
‘Very good, sir.’

2. Next, generally while the frost of disapproval is yet on, one of Bertie’s chums approaches him with a problem which to them seems insurmountable. Normally, it involves a disapproving relative on whom the friend is reliant for funds, but who for one reason or another is threatening to cut off the same, or it involves a desire to marry an unsuitable girl, generally of a theatrical persuasion (often in the chorus). Sometimes, it’s both.

I began to understand why poor old Bicky was always more or less on the rocks. To the casual and irreflective observer it may soud a pretty good wheeze having a duke for an uncle, but the trouble about old Chiswick was that, though an extremely wealthy old buster, owning half London and about five counties up north, he was notoriously the most produent spender in England. He was what Americans call a hard-boiled egg.

Sadly for poor old Bicky, he is dependent upon the above hard-boiled egg for his remittance, but that only flows because the old man believes Bicky is a success in business, and his forthcoming visit to New York will show that instead Bicky’s most notable feature is his ability to imitate a bull-terrier chasing a cat up a tree.

3. As neither Bertie nor his friends have much in the brains department, Jeeves suggests a scheme. And yet, despite the man’s undoubted brilliance, it often fails to quite come off on the first instance.

‘I was about to suggest, sir, that you might lend Mr Bickersteth this flat. Mr Bickersteth could give His Grace the impression that he was the owner of it. With your permission, I could convey the notion that I was in Mr Bickersteth’s employment and not in yours. You would be residing here temporarily as Mr Bickersteth’s guest. His Grace would occupy the second spare bedroom. I fancy that you would find this answer satisfactory, sir.’

[Later, Bertie hears that Bicky is not entirely happy with the outcome.]

‘What’s his trouble now?’
‘The scheme which I took the liberty of suggesting to Mr Bickersteth and yourself has, unfortunately, not answered entirely satisfactorily, sir.’
‘Surely the duke believes that Mr Bickersteth is doing well in business, and all that sort of thing?’
‘Exactly, sir. With the result that he has decided to cancel Mr Bickersteth’s monthly allowance, on the ground that, as Mr Bickersteth is doing so well on his own account, he no longer requires pecuniary assistance.’

4. Jeeves, however, is dauntless. With a little behind the scenes maneouvering and a great deal of native wit, he brings matters to a successful conclusion. Young love is brought together, aunts and uncles continue the provision of funds, all is well with the world. In gratitude, Bertie allows Jeeves to dispose of the offending garment over which they had originally fallen out.

‘Oh, Jeeves,’ I said; ‘about that check suit.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Is it really a frost?’
‘A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’
‘But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is?’
‘Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.’
‘He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.’
‘I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.’

The suit, it is fair to say, is by this point not long for Bertie’s wardrobe.

And that’s it, with that template and the odd minor variation you could in theory write most of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, except you couldn’t at all because none of that matters in the slightest. The structure, the plot, is merely a hook on which to hang the dialogue, the absurd situations, the general farce of it all.

Characters, too, follow types. As in the Commedia Dell’Arté the same personalities (though their names may change) recur time and again, story to story – the fearsome aunt, the rich but eccentric uncle, the intimidating fiancée, the irritating and untrustworthy young nephew, the dim but affable friend (usually either an impoverished artist or well off but dim chum from Oxford). Again, it doesn’t matter, the Commedia Dell’Arté is a meaningful comparison because it does precisely the same thing and for the same reason – the familiarity is a springboard for creativity, not merely a restraint on or lack of it.

And there we have it. On this occasion, the stories include the first encounter between Bertie and Jeeves, and one marvellous story told from Jeeve’s perspective (the stories are normally told in Bertie’s voice). Of the ten, nine are extremely funny, one a bit of a duff but that’s not a bad strike rate. This is an exceptional collection, from a major talent.

My analysis above may have made it all seem a bit dry, a bit formulaic, but it really isn’t. Instead, it’s the most wonderful froth, the foam on a glass of champagne, a quote on every page and a collection it’s impossible not to be cheered by. The formula allows Wodehouse in the space of a short story to create elaborate set-ups, mischances and misunderstandings that lead to quite simply hilarious outcomes. There is an inevitability, if an elderly aunt is convinced (wrongly) that Bertie hates cats, you know he’ll step on the poor thing before leaving the room, but watching it all unfold is a key part of the pleasure.

After the desolation of One Man’s Justice, this was the perfect follow-up and antidote, beautifully written, exceptionally funny, really quite wonderful. There is a reason these stories, these characters, are so widely loved. I’ll finish with one final quote, a conversation between Bertie and an unwelcome house guest:

‘What ho!’ I said.
‘What ho!’ said Motty.
‘What ho! What ho!’
‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

Carry on, Jeeves – sadly the rather marvellous cover in this Penguin edition appears to be being discontinued, a great shame. On another note, Trevor of The Mookse and the Gripes blog has written up one of the Psmith series here, which may also be of interest.

One Man’s Justice

Japanese literature isn’t nearly as well known as it should be. Fashionable authors such as Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami cross over (both deservedly, to be fair) but authors such as Shusako Endo or Junichiro Tanizaki get nothing like the same fame, despite their brilliance. Japan has a literary tradition which, as best I can tell, is the rival of England or France, but with nothing of the recognition in the West.

To an extent that’s natural, and a tendency to see the Japanese as stranger than they of course are makes it worse, but it’s a loss because Japanese literature contains stories which are funny, bleak, profound, whimsical and which in many cases show an appreciation for style and craft which shines through the page. South of the Border, West of the Sun. Foreign Studies. Diary of a Mad Old Man. These are rewarding works, as well as classics such as I am a Cat (which I own, but haven’t got to yet I have to admit).

Akira Yoshimura, born in 1927 and who died in 2006, was president of Japan’s writers’ union. He wrote the novel which later became the masterful film Unagi (The Eel), a surprisingly tender story about the slow rehabilitation of a man who brutally murders his wife. So far however, only two of his novels have been translated into English (sadly not including the source for The Eel), Shipwrecked and One Man’s Justice. I’ve just finished One Man’s Justice, I’ll be buying Shipwrecked.

One Man’s Justice, written in 1978 and here published by Canongate and ably translated by Mark Ealey, is the story of Lieutenant Takuya of the Western Region Anti-Aircraft Defence Group. A highly efficient officer, Takuya is part of the wartime air defence control network for Western Japan, a man with an intimate knowledge of US aircraft, their flight paths, fuel capacities, payloads and who through his instructions to anti-aircraft crews and defensive fighters plays a key role in defending his region. Night after night, US bombers fly from bases in China to bombard Japanese cities, the numbers growing as the war goes against the Japanese, fire bombs raining down and killing civilians in huge numbers. The US of course is trying to break Japan’s morale, but Takuya knows nothing of this, to him the bomber crews are monsters, men slaughtering the innocent even in cities wholly devoid of military targets.

In the early part of the bombardment, however, many of the American crews don’t make it home. Before the anti-aircraft batteries and landing strips are destroyed, Takuya and men like him organise the defences effectively, bringing down a great many American planes. Most of the crew die with their planes, but not all, and though some are ripped apart by angry Japanese mobs where they land some survive to be taken prisoner.

As anger mounts, the air raids continue and increase in severity, food runs scarce, many of the cities of the Western region lie in ruins, officers return home from their reinforced bunkers to find their homes destroyed and relatives killed. Throughout, the American prisoners are fed, cared for, but increasingly resented. When Takuya learns through a translator that on the way home from a raid the Americans would listen to jazz, swap pornography, joke, his loathing of them becomes even more furious.

It occurred to Takuya that these twenty-four American airmen in front of him were the embodiment of an enemy which had slaughtered untold numbers of his people. They had come back again and again to devastate Japanese towns and cities, leaving behind countless dead and woudned civilians. The idea that these men were receiving rice balls despite the virtual exhaustion of food supplies for the average Japanese citizen stirred anger in Takuya towards those in headquarters responsible for such decisions.

When Takuya hears the prisoners have been tried for war crimes, sentenced to death, he welcomes the news – sad only that sentence is delayed in his own region. For him, injustice lies in feeding them, not killing them.

So then, war crimes. To Takuya, the American flight crews are war criminals, evil men who kill civilians in their thousands then relax to jazz as they fly home untouched. He sees their executions as a moral imperative, not a crime against a prisoner of war, but an act of justice. He is a product of the Japanese military machine, a loyal soldier, proud to serve and proud to fight for Japan and the Emperor.

The Americans invade Okinawa, but the strength of the resistance gives the mainland Japanese cause for hope, the Americans are bogged down, fighting is horrifically fierce, every inch of ground contested. When the Okinawan defenders arefinally defeated, there is no surrender, rather they fight to the last man killing as many Americans as they can before their inevitable defeat. The US is overstretched, if the same can be repeated on Japanese mainland soil, there is hope that the war could yet be won.

Meanwhile, some of the captured airmen in Takuya’s district are executed. Some are sent for medical experimentation, others are used for testing the efficiency of new weapons, none of this strikes Takuya as remotely problematic. Rather, he is pleased that these criminals are being put to some good use, the question of whether their treatment is justifiable, whether the crimes he regards them as having committed merit such punishments, does not occur to him.

As the war draws to its close, the order comes to execute the remaining prisoners, to destroy all papers relating to them, if Japan loses the story will be that no executions took place, the prisoners were destroyed in an air raid while being moved between facilities, for that to be credible there must of course be no survivors. Takuya takes part in the executions, himself decapitating a prisoner, proud again to be of service and regretting only that he was allowed to kill but one of them.

This is challenging stuff, the point of view of a man who is a war criminal, who executes a prisoner and who when he does so does it not because of that prisoner’s own crimes (real or perceived) but because higher command wishes to cover up the treatment of other prisoners. This doesn’t occur to Takuya, he sees himself as delivering justice, but it is quite clear that his justice is the instrument of the fear of others, fear of retribution should the Americans win.

The Japanese prepare for invasion, for a scorched Earth partisan war, for a no-surrender battle over the entire soil of Japan. That is, until Hiroshima. Until Nagasaki. Until the Emperor’s surrender, an announcement so shocking that grown men weep, that Takuya has to explain to some of his men that the war is over, the idea of surrender so alien some have not understood the broadcast. And with the war over, with the occupation, it is no longer the Japanese who are deciding what constitutes a war crime.

The bulk of One Man’s Justice is not the above, this is not military fiction in any meaningful sense, rather it is the story of Takuya’s flight in a devastated and defeated country, despite the efforts of high command the Americans do learn that their airmen were executed, orders are given for the arrest of those involved. Takuya goes from being a loyal soldier, an example of Japanese honour and martial spirit, to a hunted fugitive and increasingly to a reminder of a Japan nobody now wishes to admit having been part of.

This then, is a psychological study, a study of defeat, despair, fear and the choices made by a man who knows that if caught he will surely be hanged. Takuya approaches family, friends, but they cannot help him or will not, and in any event the police are relentless in pursuing war criminals and all those he knew before will be subject to surveillance and interrogation.

The power of this novel lies in its detail, it is not an especially long book, under 300 pages, but it is painstaking in showing Takuya’s life on the run and its terrible cost. The nights spent sleeping rough, the pleas for aid, the oiling of a pistol for use to kill himself should he be about to be taken. Constantly moving, imposing himself on distant acquaintances and living in spare rooms for a week or so, while his hosts grow more resentful and the risk of his being reported increases. One of the reviews on the back cover refers to this book as “a haunting and beautifully rendered tale of enduring optimism”. No. This is a tale of the cost of living in fear, Yoshimura is not a man who believes that no matter what, you cannot be stripped of your dignity. You most certainly can.

More often than not, Takuya spent his evenings sitting in the little room at the back, squashing the fleas crawling over his clothes. Most of those he dispatched were a pinkish colour, gorged with blood which spilt out on to his fingernails as he crushed them. Occasionally he would hold a piece of underwear up to the electric light and find lines of delicately formed eggs, like tiny rosary beads, sitting neatly inside the stitching. He pierced each of them individually with a needle before going on to check the next piece of clothing. Other times, after he had got under the covers on his futon, he would take the pistol out of his rucksack and caress it in the semi-darkness. He wiped the barrel with a cloth and tested the tension of the trigger with his index finger. When he held it up to his nose, he could just detect the faint smell of oil.

Yoshimura of course lived through the post war years, and his descriptions are highly convincing. Millions die of starvation and disease, lice and vermin are everywhere. There are few jobs to be found, even the most basic materials are hard to come by, prostitution and black marketeering are rife. Among all this, the American troops travel Japan with the confidence of conquerors, effortlessly aware of their own victory.

Takuya could hear the crowd of urchins still calling out to the soldiers, ‘ Haroo, Haroo!’ He could not understand what on earth these children, and the adults standing behind them, could be doing milling around American military trucks.
As he sat contemplating the scene, he saw something quite astounding. The children had stopped calling out, and were now bent over, frantically scramblign to grab something off the ground. The adults who had been bystanders seconds earlier were also racing helter-skelter among the children, picking things up off the road. The soldiers in the truck were throwing small objects out from under the furled canvas hoods. A black soldier in one lorry purposely threw them as far as he could, and one of his white comrades in the other one watched in fits of laughter as adults and children responded to his feigned throws. Takuya sat there aghast, transfixed by what he saw.

The newspapers each day carry news of trials for war crimes, men are executed for having slapped prisoners, levels of violence normal within the Japanese army and so to Takuya wholly blameless. To him, the trials are mere revenge, but then it becomes apparent that those of his colleagues who like him went on the run are slowly being captured, their photos up in every police station, his superiors denying all knowledge of the incident and claiming Takuya and his comrades acted without orders. He cannot risk being seen in public, any encounter with the police could lead to his recognition, and so his execution, he dreams of taking dangerous work in the mines, where nobody will see him.

This is a claustrophobic novel, suffused with dread, Takuya comes to fear every stranger he passes in case they recognise him. Avoids anywhere he might meet anyone he knew, lives in a state of constant paranoia, that may or may not be justified. I will not say here where this leads, but it is fair to say the title is of course a definite play on words. Takuya, one man, exercises his justice in killing an American airman, but he too receives his justice living as an exile in his own land as the Americans and the new government pursue all those involved in such offences. Takuya is both perpetrator and victim, an instrument of justice from one perspective and a target for it from another. Yoshimura makes nothing easy here, the text exhaustively sets out the scale of the US bombardment, the toll of civilian lives, the viewpoint of the Japanese soldiers and their grounds for feeling themselves justified in their actions to the prisoners. And yet, there is no sense that medical experiments, weapons testing, pointless executions in forest clearings, that any of it is justified in return. Justice here is a social construct, an idea held by men, influenced by politics and expediency. This is not the territory of facile equivalency, rather it is a lack of any comforting answers at all.

As the occupation continues, as time passes, Takuya is changed by his constant hiding. Troubled by memories of the man he killed, cowed by the sheer physical presence of the American troops, worn down by constant flight and concealment. The war is passing into memory, quicker than he could have dreamed, his sense of righteousness – of justification, fades and although at first the sight of a Japanese girl with an American enrages him such anger cannot be maintained in the new reality he now inhabits. Takuya is in microcosm Japan, humiliated, defeated, powerless. His certainty, his superiority has been destroyed along with the cities he once defended, within a few short years nobody talks any more of the civilians dead in the bombings, of whether the US’s conduct of the war was justified. The only man who raises at his trial a defence of justification, that he executed prisoners who had been lawfully tried and who were punished themselves for the targeted bombing of civilians, is of course hanged. Under the Japanese and the Americans both, only the defeated are ever on trial.

Although dryly written (at times perhaps a little too much so), this is a powerful novel that deals in themes of patriotism, the cost of war, justice, defeat and how history is both remembered and forgotten. It addresses extremely difficult themes and a disturbing period of Japanese history, and it is unsettling and ambiguous offering no reassuringly hateful villains. The novel opens with Takuya on a train crammed with people, so tightly packed a young boy is at risk of suffocating, Takuya ensuring he has space in which to breathe. These are the first words of the novel, it’s entire story in microcosm:

The boy’s eyes were no longer on Takuya.
Each time the train lurched, the boy’s head, covered in ringworm, was buried in the gap between Takuya and the middle-aged woman standing in front of him. Takuya would lean back to create enough space for the boy to breathe. The boy looked up at Takuya repeatedly. There was a shadow of resignation in his eyes, a recognition of his powerlessness in the mass of adults, as well as a flicker of light, an entrusting of his well-being to this man who kept shifting back for him. Before long, however, the boy’s head dropped. The strain of leaning to one side may have been too much for him, for now he hardly moved his head when he was pressed between the adults. The woman standing in front of them seemed to be the boy’s mother, and Takuya could sense that he was holding on to the cloth of her work trousers.

Before we learn of Takuya’s crimes, before we learn of his isolation and despair, we see his humanity. We see that he is a patriot, a soldier, a man who believes he is doing his best for his country. That morality, that generosity, makes this book all the more challenging. If Takuya were simply evil, his crime would be so much easier to understand, he would be easier to condemn. Instead, we are put as readers in the difficult place of understanding a man who does a terrible thing, of empathising with him, raising question of what justice is and whether victor’s justice (from whatever source) can ever be anything of the kind.

One Man’s Justice. For those wanting another perspective, there’s a good review of the book at the Guardian, here.

I sat up, and the room was full of a man with a gun.

I love the pulps, pulp westerns, weird tales, adventure pulps, and definitely crime pulps. At their best, pulp novels are immediate, exciting, a ton of fun and sometimes surprisingly well written.

Until recently though, I’d never heard of Donald E. Westlake. I’d missed out. Fortunately, Guy Savage of the wonderfully titled blog His Futile Preoccupations wrote up the excellent Somebody Owes Me Money, here. That caught my interest, I bought myself a copy, and now I owe Guy Savage for the recommendation.

Somebody Owes Me Money was originally published in 1969 and is now reprinted by Hard Case Crime (an imprint I shall be looking out for a lot more going forward). By mischance, when I started it I mistakenly thought it a contemporary novel written in 2008, and was mystified by the lack of mobile phones and general period feel of the novel, eventually I realised it was contemporary, just not our contemporary. Ahem.

Anyway. Somebody Owes Me Money is the story of how Chet Conway, a New York city cabbie, a gambler, and an eloquent fellow, discovers the corpse of his bookie and ends up having to investigate the murder himself. Chet recounts the story himself, in the first person, almost the whole tale therefore being in the present tense (possibly a stylistic tip of the hat to Runyon).

Here, in the opening two paragraphs, Chet tells us a bit about himself:

I bet none of it would have happened if I wasn’t so eloquent. That’s always been my problem, eloquence, though some might claim my problem was something else again. But life’s a gamble, is what I say, and not all the eloquent people in this world are in Congress.
Where I am is in a cab in New York City. Fares frequently ask me how it is somebody as eloquent as me is driving a cab, and I usually give them a brief friendly answer which doesn’t really cover the territory. The truth is, my eloquence comes from reading rather than formal higher education, which limits the kind of job open to me. Besides, driving a cab gives me the chance to pick my own hours. Day shift when the track is closed, night shift when it’s open. If there’s a game somewhere I’m particularly interested in, I skip a night and nobody cares. And if I’m broke, I can work as many hours as I want till I make it up.

In his own writeup, Guy talks about how as soon as he read that section, he was hooked. I was the same, it’s funny, breezy, tells you a lot about the character but also establishes him as an essentially reliable narrator. We’re not in tricky literary territory here, we’re metaphorically in the back of a cab or in a bar, being told a story by a likeable guy. We’re being invited to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Chet’s tale starts with him being given a tip on a horse race by a fare, he’d rather have had a cash tip, but you get what you get and the guy seemed a smart guy so Chet places the bet. Chet’s been losing a lot lately, and needs a big win, so he bets big. The horse wins, but when Chet goes to collect, somebody’s killed his bookie. Chet realises that the bookie would have been fronting for a syndicate, so somebody, somewhere, owes him that money.

The rest of the book unfolds from Chet’s attempts to get his money, in the process popping up on the radar of the police, fueding mobsters, the dead guy’s sister and assorted other characters most of whom assume that Chet is deeper into this thing than he is and most of whom at one point or another hold him at gunpoint trying to work out what his angle is. Chet, who despite all that still manages to make it to his twice weekly poker game, keeps pushing on, partly because once involved he needs to find out what really happened in order to get himself out of it, but just as much because he really, really needs his winnings. Here, Chet explains his philosophy when it comes to violence:

If you spend much time driving a cab around New York City, especially at night, sooner or later you’ll find yourself thinking about anti-cabby violence, and what you would do if anybody ever pulled a gun or a knife on you to rob you in the cab. A long time ago I decided I was no hero, I wouldn’t argue. Anybody with a knife or gun in his hand is boss as far as I’m concerned. It’s like the old saying: The hand that cradles the rock rules the world.

Another likeable quality of this book, is the lack of bravado shown by its protagonist. Chet’s full name is of course Chester, a name he hates. He wants people to call him Chet instead, but by and large nobody does, he’s just not that impressive a guy and whatever he may want to be called Chester is what he gets. He’s smart, but he’s not ambitious or any kind of a go-getter. He’s just a smarter than average average joe, with a nice line in dialogue but none of the tough guy nature of a Spade, Marlowe or Hammer.

Here, he’s held at gunpoint (as he often is in this novel) and ordered up a flight of stairs in an apparently deserted garage:

I went up the stairs. Our six feet made complicated echoing dull rhythms on the rungs, and I thought of Robert Mitchum. What would Robert Mitchum do now, what would he do in a situation like this?
No question of it. Robert Mitchum, with the suddenness of the snake, would abruptly whirl, kick the nearest hood in the jaw, and vault over the railing and down to the garage floor. Meantime, the kicked hood would have fallen backward into the other one, and the two of them would go tumbling down the steps, out of the play long enough for Mitchum either to (a) make it to the door and out of the building and thus successfully make his escape, or (b) get into the hood’s car, in which the keys would have been left, back it at top speed through the closed garage door, and take off with a grand grinding of gears, thus successfully making his escape and getting their car into the bargain.
But what if I spun around like that, and the guy with the gun was Robert Mitchum? What would he do then? Easy. He’d duck the kick and shoot me in the head.
I plodded up the stairs.

Part of the comedy comes from Chet being so plainly unsuited to the plot of the novel, at one point he’s holed up recovering from a bullet wound, a series of different tough guys calling round to interrogate or threaten him, he spends much of a couple of chapters lying in bed literally hiding under the covers while the dead guy’s sister (pictured on the cover of the novel) stands off the hoods and protects him.

Somebody Owes Me Money features a great protagonist, but that’s far from its only strength. Westlake also shows a nice eye for characterisation, each of the crowd at the twice weekly poker game is brought quickly and easily to life, so that you feel like you’re at the table with them. No small feat, given I don’t play poker and have no understanding of the rules. Even minor characters, like Chet’s father who spends his days analysing insurance policies in the ever vain hope of finding money-making loopholes or the investigating detective with his incredibly kitsch home bar with electric lights and porcelain drunks, are well drawn and sympathetic. Westlake’s characters are a likeable crew, owing more to the criminals of Runyon’s Broadway than the world of say Thompson’s petty grifters.

Westlake is comfortable working within his genre, clearly knowing it backwards, and so it’s no surprise that the dead bookie’s sister is a beautiful blonde packing a pearl-handled automatic in her handbag. What does surprise is that Westlake’s comfortable enough to have a bit of fun with genre expectations. Sure, the sister’s a beautiful blonde, but she’s also good in a fight, loyal and maybe not so bright – not the usual qualities one expects of a beautiful blonde in a hardboiled novel. There’s a playful subversion here, a writer at home with his craft enjoying himself with it, something that shows up again near the end when the characters discuss the discovery of the real murderer in a way which echoes strongly the likely reactions of readers used to traditional mystery novel conceits – were the clues fair, was there a reasonable chance to solve the puzzle?

Like any good hardboiled writer, Westlake also has a gift for snappy dialogue. Characters come out with lines such as “… they’d fill you with so much lead we’d have to paint you yellow and call you a pencil.” and “You’re a nice guy and I like you, but I can get along without you. I can’t get along without me for a minute.” He also has a real feel for location, place, which I consider essential to good crime fiction. This is very much a New York novel, full of affection for the city and its unruffleable inhabitants.

Graham Greene used to refer to his novels as entertainments, that’s what this is, it’s not a serious novel – it’s an entertainment. But, and it’s no small but, it’s a very good entertainment indeed. It’s funny, well written, skilfully paced and somehow despite it’s cast of low-lives, gangsters, gamblers and idiots, strangely cheering. It’s a novel where the nice guys win, and where an ordinary joe turns into a sort of hero, even if not a very brave hero. Chet is an everyman, easy to relate to, and perhaps that too is part of the novel’s charm, after all, as Chet says:

… there’s a touch of Robert Mitchum in all of us, or anyway the desire to be Robert Mitchum in all of us.

Somebody Owes Me Money

By the way, check out the wonderfully pulp-styled cover for this edition, which can be seen at the above link. One of my pet hates is the trend to dress up fiction considered lowbrow in highbrow covers, to conceal what is really being read. Harry Potter being reprinted for adults with sombre themed covers, instead of the colourful and exciting covers on the editions aimed at children. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading pulp, or SF, or or YA or fantasy or whatever, so there’s no need to hide it. I love this style of cover, and Hard Case Crime win my admiration for using it.

On the topic of covers though, their choice for a new Sherlock Holmes imprint done “Hard Case Crime style” is clearly having fun with the whole concept, marvellous stuff.

Consider Phlebas

Iain Banks is a curious beast, a writer both of literary fiction and SF, successful in both fields. He’s achieved that success partly through being a very good writer, and partly by inserting a middle initial into his name whenever he writes SF so enabling bookshops to file his literary fiction in that section under the name Iain Banks and his SF in that section under the name Iain M. Banks. Apparently, the presence of the initial helps with computerised catalogues.

Of such things are careers made.

I first encountered Banks as a literary author, reading early works such as the Bridge, and a fair number of his later works such as The Crow Road and Complicity. There’s a good argument to be made though that his heart lies in his SF, most particularly his Culture novels – named after a highly advanced and utopian joint human/AI supercivilisation which forms the backdrop of most of his SF output.

The irony with Banks, is that I suspect much of his literary readership ignore his SF, and to a perhaps slightly lesser extent vice versa. But of course, the quality of the writing, the concerns of the author, these are things that don’t change with the addition or omission of a spaceship or two.

Before I talk about Consider Phlebas, Banks’s 1987 SF debut, one last note on the man himself. A while back, flying to Glasgow, I sat in a lounge in Heathrow reading Complicity. I had the book held in front of my face, by coincidence a Guardian interview with Banks open before me on the table. I put the book down for a moment, and discovered I was sitting opposite Banks, from his perspective conspicuously holding his book in the air and with his photo in front of me. It’s very hard to read a novel when the author is sitting a few yards from your face, I don’t recommend it. Banks probably now thinks I’m stalking him. On the plus side, Complicity is very good – covering similar ground to What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe but for me more successfully.

Anyway, Consider Phlebas. Published in 1987, this is a an example of epic space opera, a sprawling work that features a vast galactic war between the Idirians (an alien race of religious fanatics with a belief in their own manifest destiny) and the Culture (the post-scarcity AI run supercivilisation referred to above). Caught in the middle of this, is one Bora Horza Gobuchul, a human agent of the Idirians, ideologically opposed to the Culture, and a member of a manufactured subspecies capable of limited shapechanging so as to infiltrate enemy groups.

Horza then is our protagonist, and an interesting one as Banks’ sympathies are plainly with the Culture, Horza’s enemies. The Culture is essentially a utopia, Horza’s opposition to it based largely on anti-AI prejudice, later novels almost all focus on the Culture and the entire sequence is known as the Culture novels. Why here then is the protagonist an enemy of the civilisation Banks clearly sees as enlightened and humanist? Partly I think dramatic tension, and partly the perpetual problem with utopias – it’s very hard to wring drama from people living contented lives within the best of all possible worlds. Horza’s life is far from content, his far from the best of all possible worlds.

For the bulk of the novel, Horza and those opposing him are chasing a McGuffin. The AIs of the Culture are known as Minds, at their best these are beings with intelligence that exceeds the capacities of humans and Idirians by orders of magnitude. They are the Culture’s real advantage, the key to its success. One of these Minds has crashed on a dead planet protected by an ascended superrace, only a very limited number of people are allowed to the surface, and Horza is one of that number. The essential plot then, is Horza’s attempt following his separation from the Idirians in a space battle to recover the Mind and avoid the Culture’s attempts to stop him. McGuffins, how did plots work before we thought of them?

All of which suggests this is a plot driven work, but really it’s not. It’s much more a novel of adventure and sweeping scope. The novel opens with Horza facing an ingenious and unpleasant method of execution, there’s a daring rescue, a space battle, Horza is picked up by pirates, joins the crew, the pirates carry out a series of raids, we’re not even at the half way point yet and there’s plenty of incident left. We have gunfights, at least two panicked and spectacular escapes from imminent death, peculiar religious cults, romance, an awful lot of people dying (onscreen and off) and enough action to fill half a dozen less ambitious novels.

He spun round, tightening his finger on the trigger, but there was nobody there. Instead, a small round thing, about the size of a child’s clenched fist, wobbled on the top of the balustrade and plonked down on the moss about a metre away. He kicked at it with his foot and dived across the body of the dead monk.
The grenade detonated in mid-air, just under the balcony.
Horza jumped up while the echoes were still cracking back from the altar. He leapt into the doorway at the far end of the balcony, putting out one hand and grabbing the soft corner of the wall as he went past, spinning himself round as he fell to his knees. He reached out and grabbed the dead monk’s gun from the corpse’s slack grip, just as the balcony started to come away from the wall with a glassy, grinding noise. Horza shoved himself back into the corridor behind him. The balcony tipped bodily away into the empty space of the hall in a dully glittering cloud of fragments and fell with a great shattering crash onto the floor below, taking the shadowy form of the dead monk fluttering with it.

Along with all this, there is constantly an emphasis on scale. The Idirian/Culture war spans thousands of solar systems, hundreds of billions of people are killed, Horza visits an artificial ringworld spanning a sun (a clear homage to Niven) which is so vast that two kilometre long ships perpetually cruise its surface, yet barely take any of its space. Horza spends a fair amount of time trapped on a tiny island on the ring, Banks using the claustrophobic circumstance as another way of emphasising the stellar scale of the overall structure.

Vavatch lay in space like a god’s bracelet. The fourteen-million-kilometre hoop glittered and sparkled, blue and gold against the black gulf of space beyond. As the Clear Air Turbulence warped in towards the Orbital, most of the Company watched their goal approach on the main screen in the mess. The acquamarine sea, which covered most of the surface of the artefact’s ultradense base material, was spattered with white puffs of cloud, collected in huge storm systems or vast banks, some of which seemed to stretch right across the full thirty-five-thousand kilometre breadth of the slowly turning Orbital.
Only on one side of that looped band of water was there any land visible, hard up against one sloped retaining wall of pure crystal. Although, from the distance they were watching, the sliver of land looked like a tiny brown thread lying on the edge of a great rolled-out bolt of vivid blue, that thread was anything up to two thousand kilometres across; there was no shortage of land on Vavatch.
Its greatest attraction, however, was and had always been the megaships.

Across the galaxy, a key Culture strategist lives on orbital platforms so vast they house artificial mountain ranges, oceans, billions of inhabitants. A dead planet contains kilometres of huge tunnels, containing massive trains built in a complex designed to survive nuclear assault. Everywhere, there is scale, size, vastness. Card games played on planets about to fall into black holes, a diversity of species so great that reference can be made to past civilisations that spanned thousands of stars and yet are now forgotten, a war so huge it continues for decades with entire civilisations being inadvertently caught up in its traces, and yet is ultimately described as a “small, short war”.

At its best, this sense of scale and vastness works tremendously, space opera at its finest. It also allows Banks to do something quite clever, Horza and his opponents all consider their part of the conflict tremendously important. Traditionally, in Space Opera, it would be, the protagonist’s actions shaping the outcome of the war. Here though, this is simply a side skirmish, important to its participants, but with no implication of any real wider importance. War consists of a great many small conflicts, many of which may for a while be strategically important, but in the context of the overall conflict loss or victory of one rarely makes a significant difference to the final outcome. Here, Banks consciously undermines the role of the hero in space opera, while still celebrating the sweep and grandeur of the genre.

More problematically, many of the characters are fairly forgettable, characterisation is light throughout and as a shape changing professional infiltrator Horza’s own personality is fairly plastic, often changing to the needs of the situation. Characters are broadly drawn, with a couple of identifying traits, and while characterisation is far better than say with Stephen Baxter (who’s got very lazy on that front in my view) it’s fair to say the focus is on the big picture, not the small detail. I would make an honourable exception for Unaha-Closp, a rather passive-aggressive maintenance drone accidentally kidnapped by Horza who then spends a large chunk of the novel making disparaging remarks about the company he’s forced into. One of the novel’s many jokes is that most of the characters regard UC as merely a machine, but (and I don’t think this is at all accidental) he is in fact one of the more rounded characters in the book.

‘Machine,’ [Horza] said, ‘we’re going to Schar’s World. If you want to go back to the GSV I’ll gladly put you in a vactube and let you make your own way back. But you mention returning and getting a fair trial one more time and I’m going to blast your synthetic fucking brains out, understand?’
‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ the drone bellowed. ‘I’ll have you know I am an Accredited Free Construct, certified sentient under Administration and with full citizenship of the Vavatch Heterocracy. I am near to paying off my Incurred Generation Debt, when I’ll be free to do exactly what I like, and have already been accepted for a degree course in applied paratheology at the university of-’
‘Will you shut your goddamn … speaker and listen?’ Horza shouted, breaking into the machine’s breathless dialogue. ‘We’re not on Vavatch, and I don’t care how god-damned smart you are, or how many qualifications you’ve got. You’re on this ship and you do as I say. You want to get off? Get off now and float back to whatever’s left of your precious fucking Orbital. Stay, and you obey orders. Or get junked.’

[Unaha-Closp, after some discussion, unsurprisingly decides to stay.]

‘But I am obliged to serve immediate notice on you that under the terms of my Retrospective Construction Agreement, my Incurred Generation Debt Loan Agreement and my Employment Contract, your forcible removal of myself from my place of work makes you liable for the servicing of said debt until my return, as well as risking civil and criminal proceedings-’
‘Fucking hell, drone,’ Yalson interrupted. ‘Sure it wasn’t law you were going to study?’
‘I take full responsibility, machine,’ Horza told it. ‘Now, shut-’
‘Well, I hope you’re properly insured,’ the drone muttered.
‘-up!.

Pacing is also sometimes an issue. Banks can (and does) write sequences which are genuinely thrilling, a desparate battle in an alien temple, a terrified flight from a colossal but dying ship, Horza clinging to the outside of a shuttle coming under fire. The problem is, entire sections of the book are essentially unnecessary. At one point, Horza is trapped with a vicious and insane religious cult. It’s fun stuff, though rather gory in places, but it could be deleted in its entirety with no impact on the rest of the novel. Horza gets stranded with the cult, later escapes, everything that happens in between is mere incident which may be enjoyable but which also is a diversion from the main story and has no consequences for it.

Finally, though this is a much lesser point, the science is sometimes a bit off. This isn’t a hard sf novel, so complaining about hyperspace without causality violation would be to rather fundamentally miss the point, but I did rather groan when a character travelling in a vacuum at 1g turned off his suit-jets and promptly came to a halt. Happily, in the main no attempt is made to explain the superscience found in the work, the characters understand it no better than I do the workings of my ipod and take its functioning equally for granted.

Despite the issues of characterisation, pacing and scenic yet pointless diversions, Consider Phlebas remains a very readable novel. Banks is a blackly witty writer, his set pieces are tremendous, the Idirians and the Culture both make for interesting civilisations and his galaxy is a vibrant and alive place. Most of all, there is a verve to it all which carries the reader along, a sheer joy in the telling. There were certainly times I wondered if an extended description of a card game was really all that important in the grand scheme of things, but Banks never actually lost me. In terms of structure, this is a novel which for me has (appropriately enough) huge issues, and it’s a mark of quite how good a writer Banks is that in the main I didn’t really care.

I’ve not talked here about the intricacies of the plot, I’ve not discussed the secondary characters such as Horza’s lover (a lightly furred mercenary, what is it with sf and furry women? Actually, please don’t answer that), his opposing number from the Culture, the pirate captain or a key Idirian fanatic, all this works well enough but none of it is the point. Consider Phlebas is a novel of epic battles, vast spaceships, ancient alien civilisations and galactic scales. It is what the general public think of when it thinks of SF, unabashedly so, and it’s sheer celebration of the potential of the form is for me both refreshing and a reminder of how good space opera can be when it’s done well.

Consider Phlebas

Awfully chic to be killed

The Soldier’s Art is the eighth volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, midway through Autumn, deep now into war.

Nick Jenkins has taken up a role as assistant to Widmerpool, now a Major serving at divisional HQ. It is 1941, air raids are frequent and the monotony of military life is at odds with the constant threat of enemy bombs.

As ever in Dance, this volume takes us through a handful of episodes in Nick’s life: a mess dinner; a period of leave back in London; political infighting within the division. Each, again as ever, is meticulously observed. The tone, however, is darkening and there is far less of the humour that leavened The Valley of Bones.

Old characters recur, Stringham makes a fresh appearance, Bithel introduced in The Valley of Bones continues as commander of the Mobile Laundry Unit, Moreland recurs as do several others met through the series. Each though is disturbed by wartime, relationships altered, lives changed, all is in flux, although as Nick at one point says:

‘Everything alters, yet does remain the same.

A line that could summarise the philosophy behind the whole of Dance so far.

New characters are also introduced, generals, colonels, men who served in the last war pressed into service again in this. At divisional HQ, and at the senior ranks, a certain eccentricity can it seems be afforded, again military life throws together men who in peacetime would naturally have nothing to do with each other. Descriptions are of course excellent:

Hogbourne-Johnson, a full colonel with red tabs, was in charge of operational duties, the staff officer who represented the General in all routine affairs. A Regular, decorated with an MC from the previous war, he was tall, getting decidedly fat, with a small beaky nose set above a pouting mouth turning down at the corners. He somewhat resembled an owl, an angry, ageing bird, recently baulked of a field-mouse and looking about for another small animal to devour.

Equally, of another man:

Above all, he bestowed around him a sense of smoothness, ineffable, unstemmable smoothness, like oil flowing ever so gently from the spout of a vessel perfectly regulated by its pourer, soft lubricating fluid, gradually, but irresistibly, spreading; and spreading, let it be said, over an unexpectedly wide, even a vast area.

This is a critical book in the series, so much so that I am reluctant to say too much about it for fear of ruining its many surprises. It deals in themes of transience and loss, of uncertainty. Much of the book is spent with characters’ futures unclear, for the military the possibility of promotion, expulsion, transfer, variously before them. For the civilians, new relationships and failing marriages against a backdrop of wartime privation make things little better.

For all the encroachment of chaos though, just as many are lost or discomifited by war, some always profit from it. Widmerpool is in his element, ceaselessly maneouvering to appoint those he prefers to places of utility, to defeat those he opposes, to secure his own advancement. Nick is faring less well, now dependent on Widmerpool’s favour, knowing that when Widmerpool is finally promoted Nick’s own post will be redundant and without help he will likely be despatched to the Infantry Training Course – a prospectless dead end.

Through Widmerpool, and the other officers Nick meets, we again of course explore different philosophies of life, Widmerpool living the life of the will, imposing himself by sheer force of personality upon the world and shaping it to his liking, creating order, his own lack of self-insight his greatest weapon. Others are equally ruthless, but charming, while others experience life as something that happens to them (Nick himself of course chief among these). There is no judgement here, no condemnation, merely an examination of how some by choice determine their own fate, while for others fate seems imposed by others or merely random.

For me, this was a hugely sad novel, filled with a sense of despondency. 1941 was, I believe, the bleakest time of the war: the German invasion of Russia comes only near the end of this volume, and of course the Americans are still nowhere to be seen. It is a time when defeat is a genuine possibility, Europe has fallen and without our benefit of hindsight for Nick and his compatriots the fall of Britain too is a very real possibility. The nightly bombs claim lives, offstage men Nick has come to know are reported killed, death is everywhere. In volume seven we entered the valley of bones, here we are deep inside it. The title of this blog entry is a quote from Stringham, and becomes a savagely ironic comment on what is happening to many of the fashionable set he once belonged to.

With all that, there are still some definite moments of humour, Powell is an effortlessly witty writer when he wishes to be, I particularly liked this sly dig at amateur novelists:

‘I never get time to settle down to serious writing,’ he used to say, thereby making what almost amounted to a legal declaration in defining his own inclusion within an easily recognisable category of non-starting litetary apprenticeship.

A conversation between Nick and a general about the merits of Trollope is also very funny. More subtly, a conversation between Nick and Stringham veers from the tragic, to the absurd, to the comic as Stringham realises he is only talking about himself – asks Nick how he is doing – then interrupts to talk unselfconsciously again about his own concerns.

Finally, as throughout the series, there is a sense at times of classical drama, of the mythic reflected in the mundane. Here, Nick and Moreland exit a restaurant during Nick’s leave:

We paid the bill, went out into Regent Street. In the utter blackness, the tarts, strange luminous forms of nocturnal animal life, flickered the bulbs of their electric torches. From time to time one of them would play the light against her own face in self-advertisement, giving the effect of candles illuminating a holy picture in the shadows of a church.

Classicism, change, fate, philosophy, death, there is a lot here. With so downbeat a volume this wasn’t my favourite of the series so far by any means, but it still had real power, at times devastating effect. Here, some leave the dance, not everyone makes it out of this volume alive, and having spent much of seven previous volumes getting to know these characters, seeing their lives, the shock of their deaths is all the more real. Literature struggles with the finality and stupidity of death, here Powell meets it head on and by the sheer breadth and ambition of his work makes us feel it as few other novelists can.

Or that’s one take, but as Stringham says in one of the truest lines I’ve read in a while:

Like everything that’s any good, it has about twenty different meanings.

The Soldier’s Art